Exactly. With the high-tech laser vs. traditional firearms issue, a laser needs electricity to power it, but that can come from many different sources. But a traditional firearm need bullets, which require specific resources to make, or have to be bought, and have to be in exactly the right configuration to work. No point in having 9mm bullets if your gun is an AR-15.
Also, the laser has few, if any, moving parts, so maintenance is probably far easier.
Both of those would make it a better choice for a semi-primitive lifestyle.
It wasn’t a big part of Little Fuzzy, but in that same universe, H. Beam Piper had the Khougras. They were recognized as sapient, but were pretty low-grade. They had a spoken language, but it didn’t have very many words, less than a hundred if I recall correctly. There were mentions of them being used for mostly grunt labour under close supervision.
Well you see it a lot with future earth-based civilizations.
I think for non-Earth, it’s a tall order because arguably the most important requirement is that it looks alien to the audience, yet we’re starting from a very familiar base for many of them.
e.g. I like how Xelaya was portrayed on The Orville, but it did also feel like the 51st state of America.
Also it’s worth baring in mind that not everyone sees the suburbs as the ideal (not that you were necessarily saying this, I’m just saying). In much of Asia, people already live in bladerunner-like supercities. While a lot of that is out of necessity, culture plays a part and I can say from experience that there are advantages to living in these cities…it’s a more comfortable life in many ways, even if to many Americans it might on the face of it look like hell.
I’m not sure how different that is from needing the right batteries for your laser rifle; and those batteries, at least from our current knowledge base, would require a lot more tech to make than a bullet mold and some gunpowder.
The battery could be built-in. With battery tech improving all the time, there’s no reason to think the future battery wouldn’t last indefinitely. So long as you had at least occasional access to some kind of generator, you could keep it charged indefinitely as well. Solar, hydroelectric, wind, gas powered, even just hand-cranked, if you’re determined enough.
Maybe. But somebody’s still going to have to be making these high-tech last-forever batteries.
Of course, it’s fiction. You could handwave that somebody’s managed to invent an easy-to-produce, high-power, small, low-weight battery that lasts for hundreds of years.
Well, yes, that’s the whole point. “Horatius’ High Tech Lasers&Shit” is a travelling sales force. We buy self-contained pieces of high tech from The Super Science Planet, and then go around selling those pieces to the Low Tech Space Amish Planets. Thus, you end up seeing Space Amish communities living in wooden houses, riding horse-drawn carriages, but using HHTL&S’s lasers for hunting.
I can imagine a future civilisation where a lot of people live in temporary homes: easily-transportable tents or yurts, or maybe in thatched huts that they build themselves; but there are autonomous Philip K Dick ‘autofacs’ dotted around, with robots delivering hi-tech merchandise if you want it. The autofacs are controlled by benevolent machines of loving grace (who decline to deliver too many laser rifles for health and safety reasons).
Hmm; I seem to remember an ‘Electric Dreams’ episode about this particular utopia; it wasn’t quite as nice as one might anticipate.
That’s already a real-life situation. Millions of people live in homes that don’t have electricity, but they have cell phones. How? The village they live in pools their money, and buys a generator from the big city that anyone in the village can use.
About two people die in car wrecks every minute in real life, but if someone refused to use a car because “they’re too dangerous,” most people would give them a little roll-eye.
Doesn’t Star Trek have the equivalent of OSHA to conduct an investigation in the case of any on-duty deaths before allowing a piece of equipment (such as the transporter) to be used once again?
Don’t forget…native American religions. Star Trek seems to think they not only survive into the 24th century, but are apparently real, not just beliefs. They treat them sincerely, not how they treat other human religions.
Or maybe the writers are condescending to native Americans “yes yes your religion is valid and true. Now go away, and please don’t notice we have a Mexican American playing a Native American. KTHX bye.”.
I’d say it was a sign of senility: Bones long ago got over being beamed around. He made his peace with the fact that the original Bones is long dead, and that This One is just a copy.
Bones seems like the type to do orbital reentry once.
I’d imagine Bones handles being atomically disintegrated the same way a Victorian Blue Blood gets into a Aeroplane, with dignity but profound resigned reluctance.
This supports my theory that the Soviet Union won WWIII. That’s why there is no capitalism, and no government regulations. Having a nanny state government looking out for everyone’s safety is an American thing.
Obviously they don’t have warning signs, like “don’t stand in front of the plasma power tap when M5 is active”, or rules like "don’t have sharp antique surgical instruments nearby to unrestrained genetically engineered supermen ".
Apparently the soviet era joke about “when communism is perfected everyone will have everything they want” is true, thanks to unlimited power and replicators. And holodecks.
Not just in movies. It’s unfortunately common in books too: a ‘mainstream’ writer gets this lightbulb idea… oooh, I know, I’ll write a ‘science fiction’ book, how hard can it be? After all these SF nerds are illiterate, they don’t know how to use language properly, etc etc…
But not having read any good hard SF their results are often laughable.
You know… a planet is destroyed but two survivers escape on a rocketship. At the last moment before their supplies run out, they find a new habitable planet where they can start afresh. Their names were…
As a kid, I read nothing but Sci-Fi short stories, and a lot of bad ones. So I OD’ed on heavy-handed “meaningful” SF even before Star Trek started to address “meaningful” social issues… with all the subtlety of a 2x4 from the replicator.
